Month: October 2016

Late Autumn and rain has arrived to Finland and now we have good reason to stay at home and read about new ideas and what happens in technology.

Weekly notes, issue 12, 30.10.2016

Learning new things

Cyber Security Base with F‑Secure
Free and open course to learn about tools used to analyse flaws in software systems, necessary knowledge to build secure software systems, the skills needed to perform risk and threat analysis on existing systems and the relevant legislation within EU. It’s a course series by University of Helsinki in collaboration with F‑Secure Cyber Security Academy that focuses on building core knowledge and abilities related to the work of a cyber security professional.

Google Style Guides
Thinking about how to format your code? Luckily Google Style Guides has solved it for you. And with explanations like for Java.

Free programming books by O’Reilly
O’Reilly is known for their programming books and they’ve compiled the latest insights of what’s happening in the world of software engineering, architecture, and open source. Lot’s of topics regarding microservices from different aspects.

Open Guides: Amazon Web Services
“AWS’s own documentation is a great but sprawling resource few have time to read fully, and it doesn’t include anything but official facts, so omits experiences of engineers.” Open Guides: AWS is by and for engineers who use AWS. It aims to be a useful, living reference that consolidates links, tips, gotchas, and best practices. It arose from discussion and editing over beers by several engineers who have used AWS extensively.

Something different

Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3
“Simple-looking port hides a world of complexity, and the (thankful) backward-compatibility uses different kinds of cables for different tasks. Shoppers have to be very careful to buy exactly the right cable for their devices!”

Development and operations, DevOps, is in my opinion essential for getting things done with timely manner and it’s always good to hear how others are doing it by attending meetups. This time DevOps Finland went Mobile and we heard nice presentations about continuous delivery for mobile applications, mobile testing with Appium and the Robot Framework and efficient mobile development cycle. Compared to developing Web applications mobile brings some extra hurdles to jump but nothing that’s not solvable. Here are my short notes about the meetup.

The meetup was hosted by Zalando Technology at their new office here in Helsinki. Zalando is known to many as that online store that sells shoes, clothing and other fashion items but things don’t sell themselves and behind the scenes they have lots of technologies to keep things running. For the record I think they said that the meetup had 65 attendees of the 100.

They didn’t arrive to the final setup straightforward and it was iterative approach with how Git is used, code merged and releases done. Using Fastlane for all tedious tasks, like generating screenshots, dealing with code signing, and releasing your application made automating things easier. Interesting note was that their build server slaves are ansible managed Mac Minis on Rami’s desk. They had solved the problems nicely but testing is still difficult.

DevOps and rollbacks don’t work together, you roll forward.

Mobile testing with Appium and the Robot Framework

Mobile testing can be done with different tools and one option is to use Robot Framework just like for Web applications. Elmeri Poikolainen from Eficode demoed how to use Appium and run Robot Framework tests on real device. It has some limitations and I think with native applications it could be better to use native test tools like what Xcode has to offer.